House of Death plot continues to unfold

An unusual narcotics slaying in neighboring Juarez, Mexico, last summer has law-enforcement officials here and in Washington, D.C., asking serious questions about the role of government agencies in handling undercover informants.

Narco News reported in-depth on this story in April. The story revealed that an informant for the U.S. government was implicated in a series of murders in Juárez, Mexico -- located just across the border from El Paso, Texas.

The informant’s handlers, agents with the El Paso office of the federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), were allegedly fully aware of the informant’s complicity in the murders, yet did nothing to stop the killing for fear of jeopardizing the cases they were trying to make with the informant’s help.

The recent Washington Times story also pulls the following out of the air:

Some "bad blood" between ICE and the DEA remains, sources told The Washington Times, because Contreras was once involved in an aborted attempt to kill two DEA agents in Juarez. Some DEA agents think ICE was aware of the scheme.

Again, Narco News reported the whole sordid affair in April. Here’s a teaser: The lid was blown off of (the) death house operation, as was the fact that some officials with ICE and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, in their zeal to make a case, had allowed up to 12 murders to occur under their watch and now had nearly cost the lives of two DEA agents.

The irony of the situation is how easily things could have played out differently that day, and the murder spree would have continued unabated. The address that the torture victim gave … was almost correct: two tons of grass were later found in the house next door to the DEA agent’s home in Juarez.

But the damage was done. As a result of the traffic stop, DEA evacuated all of its agents and their families from Juarez as a safety precaution.

The Washington Times did break some new ground in the story, though, by printing the name of the informant involved in the slayings.

 Sources close to the El Paso ICE office say the informant, known by the alias Jesus Contreras, or Agent 913, entered the U.S. Witness Protection Program. They say he might have been involved in five or six other killings.
    He reportedly was paid more than $75,000.

Narco News sources also confirm that the informant’s name is Jesus Contreras. Whether that is his real name or one of many aliases is not clear. He also is known by the nickname “Lalo.”

Narco News sources also add a few more tidbits to the fire raging over this case. They allege the informant was a former Mexican state police officer from Chihuahua. He had been on the U.S government’s payroll since about 1998.

In addition, one of the ICE supervisors involved in overseeing the informant, Patricia Kramer, has been transferred back to Washington, D.C., where she is now in a Department of Homeland Security liaison position (allegedly working with the CIA), multiple sources contend.

The strange brew gets even more intense, given that sources also tell Narco News that in pursuing the case, an ICE agent and his supervisor actually went into Mexico with the informant “to meet with the bad guys,” who were allegedly linked to the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes’ Juarez drug organization. The ICE agent and supervisor posed as “crooked Mexican cops.” The sources even contend the ICE agents visited the death house – which was to become the site of a dozen grizzly drug-related murders.

Stay tuned…..